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Thank you Paul and Jim for those kind introductions. I would
especially like to thank our host, New York University and the
President of the College John Sexton and the Dean of the Law School
Richard Revesz. I am also grateful to our co-sponsors, the World
Resources Institute and Set America Free.

A few days ago, scientists announced alarming new evidence of
the rapid melting of the perennial ice of the north polar cap,
continuing a trend of the past several years that now confronts us with
the prospect that human activities, if unchecked in the next decade,
could destroy one of the earth’s principle mechanisms for cooling
itself. Another group of scientists presented evidence that human
activities are responsible for the dramatic warming of sea surface
temperatures in the areas of the ocean where hurricanes form. A few
weeks earlier, new information from yet another team showed dramatic
increases in the burning of forests throughout the American West, a
trend that has increased decade by decade, as warmer temperatures have
dried out soils and vegetation. All these findings come at the end of a
summer with record breaking temperatures and the hottest twelve month
period ever measured in the U.S., with persistent drought in vast areas
of our country. Scientific American introduces the lead article in its
special issue this month with the following sentence: “The debate on
global warming is over.”

Many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to
several “tipping points” that could — within as little as 10 years —
make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s
habitability for human civilization. In this regard, just a few weeks
ago, another group of scientists reported on the unexpectedly rapid
increases in the release of carbon and methane emissions from frozen
tundra in Siberia, now beginning to thaw because of human caused
increases in global temperature. The scientists tell us that the tundra
in danger of thawing contains an amount of additional global warming
pollution that is equal to the total amount that is already in the
earth’s atmosphere. Similarly, earlier this year, yet another team of
scientists reported that the previous twelve months saw 32 glacial
earthquakes on Greenland between 4.6 and 5.1 on the Richter scale — a
disturbing sign that a massive destabilization may now be underway deep
within the second largest accumulation of ice on the planet, enough ice
to raise sea level 20 feet worldwide if it broke up and slipped into
the sea. Each passing day brings yet more evidence that we are now
facing a planetary emergency — a climate crisis that demands immediate
action to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in order to
turn down the earth’s thermostat and avert catastrophe.

The serious debate over the climate crisis has now moved on to
the question of how we can craft emergency solutions in order to avoid
this catastrophic damage.

This debate over solutions has been slow to start in earnest not
only because some of our leaders still find it more convenient to deny
the reality of the crisis, but also because the hard truth for the rest
of us is that the maximum that seems politically feasible still falls
far short of the minimum that would be effective in solving the crisis.
This no-man’s land — or no politician zone –falling between the
farthest reaches of political feasibility and the first beginnings of
truly effective change is the area that I would like to explore in my
speech today.

T. S. Eliot once wrote: Between the idea and the reality,
Between the motion and the act Falls the Shadow. … Between the
conception and the creation, Between the emotion and the response Falls
the Shadow.

My purpose is not to present a comprehensive and detailed
blueprint — for that is a task for our democracy as a whole — but
rather to try to shine some light on a pathway through this terra
incognita that lies between where we are and where we need to go.
Because, if we acknowledge candidly that what we need to do is beyond
the limits of our current political capacities, that really is just
another way of saying that we have to urgently expand the limits of
what is politically possible.

I have no doubt that we can do precisely that, because having
served almost three decades in elected office, I believe I know one
thing about America’s political system that some of the pessimists do
not: it shares something in common with the climate system; it can
appear to move only at a slow pace, but it can also cross a tipping
point beyond which it can move with lightning speed. Just as a single
tumbling rock can trigger a massive landslide, America has sometimes
experienced sudden avalanches of political change that had their
beginnings with what first seemed like small changes.

Two weeks ago, Democrats and Republicans joined together in our
largest state, California, to pass legally binding sharp reductions in
CO2 emissions. 295 American cities have now independently “ratified”
and embraced CO2 reductions called for in the Kyoto Treaty. 85
conservative evangelical ministers publicly broke with the Bush-Cheney
administration to call for bold action to solve the climate crisis.
Business leaders in both political parties have taken significant steps
to position their companies as leaders in this struggle and have
adopted a policy that not only reduces CO2 but makes their companies
zero carbon companies. Many of them have discovered a way to increase
profits and productivity by eliminating their contributions to global
warming pollution.

Many Americans are now seeing a bright light shining from the
far side of this no-man’s land that illuminates not sacrifice and
danger, but instead a vision of a bright future that is better for our
country in every way — a future with better jobs, a cleaner
environment, a more secure nation, and a safer world.

After all, many Americans are tired of borrowing huge amounts of
money from China to buy huge amounts of oil from the Persian Gulf to
make huge amounts of pollution that destroys the planet’s climate.
Increasingly, Americans believe that we have to change every part of
that pattern.

When I visit port cities like Seattle, New Orleans, or
Baltimore, I find massive ships, running low in the water, heavily
burdened with foreign cargo or foreign oil arriving by the thousands.
These same cargo ships and tankers depart riding high with only ballast
water to keep them from rolling over.

One-way trade is destructive to our economic future. We send
money, electronically, in the opposite direction. But, we can change
this by inventing and manufacturing new solutions to stop global
warming right here in America. I still believe in good old-fashioned
American ingenuity. We need to fill those ships with new products and
technologies that we create to turn down the global thermostat. Working
together, we can create jobs and stop global warming. But we must begin
by winning the first key battle — against inertia and the fear of
change.

In order to conquer our fear and walk boldly forward on the path
that lies before us, we have to insist on a higher level of honesty in
America’s political dialogue. When we make big mistakes in America, it
is usually because the people have not been given an honest accounting
of the choices before us. It also is often because too many members of
both parties who knew better did not have the courage to do better.

Our children have a right to hold us to a higher standard when
their future — indeed the future of all human civilization — is hanging
in the balance. They deserve better than the spectacle of censorship of
the best scientific evidence about the truth of our situation and
harassment of honest scientists who are trying to warn us about the
looming catastrophe. They deserve better than politicians who sit on
their hands and do nothing to confront the greatest challenge that
humankind has ever faced — even as the danger bears down on us.

We in the United States of America have a particularly important
responsibility, after all, because the world still regards us — in
spite of our recent moral lapses — as the natural leader of the
community of nations. Simply put, in order for the world to respond
urgently to the climate crisis, the United States must lead the way. No
other nation can.

Developing countries like China and India have gained their own
understanding of how threatening the climate crisis is to them, but
they will never find the political will to make the necessary changes
in their growing economies unless and until the United States leads the
way. Our natural role is to be the pace car in the race to stop global
warming.

So, what would a responsible approach to the climate crisis look like if we had one in America?

Well, first of all, we should start by immediately freezing CO2
emissions and then beginning sharp reductions. Merely engaging in
high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while
continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional
and reckless approach. In some ways, that approach is worse than doing
nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that
something is actually being done when in fact it is not.

An immediate freeze has the virtue of being clear, simple, and
easy to understand. It can attract support across partisan lines as a
logical starting point for the more difficult work that lies ahead. I
remember a quarter century ago when I was the author of a complex
nuclear arms control plan to deal with the then rampant arms race
between our country and the former Soviet Union. At the time, I was
strongly opposed to the nuclear freeze movement, which I saw as
simplistic and naive. But, ¾ of the American people supported it — and
as I look back on those years I see more clearly now that the
outpouring of public support for that very simple and clear mandate
changed the political landscape and made it possible for more detailed
and sophisticated proposals to eventually be adopted.

When the politicians are paralyzed in the face of a great
threat, our nation needs a popular movement, a rallying cry, a
standard, a mandate that is broadly supported on a bipartisan basis.

A responsible approach to solving this crisis would also involve
joining the rest of the global economy in playing by the rules of the
world treaty that reduces global warming pollution by authorizing the
trading of emissions within a global cap.

At present, the global system for carbon emissions trading is
embodied in the Kyoto Treaty. It drives reductions in CO2 and helps
many countries that are a part of the treaty to find the most efficient
ways to meet their targets for reductions. It is true that not all
countries are yet on track to meet their targets, but the first targets
don’t have to be met until 2008 and the largest and most important
reductions typically take longer than the near term in any case.

The absence of the United States from the treaty means that 25%
of the world economy is now missing. It is like filling a bucket with a
large hole in the bottom. When the United States eventually joins the
rest of the world community in making this system operate well, the
global market for carbon emissions will become a highly efficient
closed system and every corporate board of directors on earth will have
a fiduciary duty to manage and reduce CO2 emissions in order to protect
shareholder value.

Many American businesses that operate in other countries already
have to abide by the Kyoto Treaty anyway, and unsurprisingly, they are
the companies that have been most eager to adopt these new principles
here at home as well. The United States and Australia are the only two
countries in the developed world that have not yet ratified the Kyoto
Treaty. Since the Treaty has been so demonized in America’s internal
debate, it is difficult to imagine the current Senate finding a way to
ratify it. But the United States should immediately join the discussion
that is now underway on the new tougher treaty that will soon be
completed. We should plan to accelerate its adoption and phase it in
more quickly than is presently planned.

Third, a responsible approach to solutions would avoid the
mistake of trying to find a single magic “silver bullet” and recognize
that the answer will involve what Bill McKibben has called
“silver-buckshot” — numerous important solutions, all of which are
hard, but no one of which is by itself the full answer for our problem.

One of the most productive approaches to the “multiple
solutions” needed is a road-map designed by two Princeton professors,
Rob Socolow and Steven Pacala, which breaks down the overall problem
into more manageable parts. Socolow and Pacala have identified 15 or 20
building blocks (or “wedges”) that can be used to solve our problem
effectively — even if we only use 7 or 8 of them. I am among the many
who have found this approach useful as a way to structure a discussion
of the choices before us.

Over the next year, I intend to convene an ongoing broad-based
discussion of solutions that will involve leaders from government,
science, business, labor, agriculture, grass-roots activists, faith
communities and others.

I am convinced that it is possible to build an effective
consensus in the United States and in the world at large on the most
effective approaches to solve the climate crisis. Many of those
solutions will be found in the building blocks that currently structure
so many discussions. But I am also certain that some of the most
powerful solutions will lie beyond our current categories of building
blocks and “wedges.” Our secret strength in America has always been our
capacity for vision. “Make no little plans,” one of our most famous
architects said over a century ago, “they have no magic to stir men’s
blood.”

I look forward to the deep discussion and debate that lies
ahead. But there are already some solutions that seem to stand out as
particularly promising:

First, dramatic improvements in the efficiency with which we
generate, transport and use energy will almost certainly prove to be
the single biggest source of sharp reductions in global warming
pollution. Because pollution has been systematically ignored in the old
rules of America’s marketplace, there are lots of relatively easy ways
to use new and more efficient options to cheaply eliminate it. Since
pollution is, after all, waste, business and industry usually become
more productive and efficient when they systematically go about
reducing pollution. After all, many of the technologies on which we
depend are actually so old that they are inherently far less efficient
than newer technologies that we haven’t started using. One of the best
examples is the internal combustion engine. When scientists calculate
the energy content in BTUs of each gallon of gasoline used in a typical
car, and then measure the amounts wasted in the car’s routine
operation, they find that an incredible 90% of that energy is
completely wasted. One engineer, Amory Lovins, has gone farther and
calculated the amount of energy that is actually used to move the
passenger (excluding the amount of energy used to move the several tons
of metal surrounding the passenger) and has found that only 1% of the
energy is actually used to move the person. This is more than an arcane
calculation, or a parlor trick with arithmetic. These numbers actually
illuminate the single biggest opportunity to make our economy more
efficient and competitive while sharply reducing global warming
pollution.

To take another example, many older factories use obsolete
processes that generate prodigious amounts of waste heat that actually
has tremendous economic value. By redesigning their processes and
capturing all of that waste, they can eliminate huge amounts of global
warming pollution while saving billions of dollars at the same time.

When we introduce the right incentives for eliminating pollution
and becoming more efficient, many businesses will begin to make greater
use of computers and advanced monitoring systems to identify even more
opportunities for savings. This is what happened in the computer chip
industry when more powerful chips led to better computers, which in
turn made it possible to design even more powerful chips, in a virtuous
cycle of steady improvement that became known as “Moore’s Law.” We may
well see the emergence of a new version of “Moore’s Law” producing
steadily higher levels of energy efficiency at steadily lower cost.

There is yet another lesson we can learn from America’s success
in the information revolution. When the Internet was invented — and I
assure you I intend to choose my words carefully here — it was because
defense planners in the Pentagon forty years ago were searching for a
way to protect America’s command and communication infrastructure from
being disrupted in a nuclear attack. The network they created — known
as ARPANET — was based on “distributed communication” that allowed it
to continue functioning even if part of it was destroyed.

Today, our nation faces threats very different from those we
countered during the Cold War. We worry today that terrorists might try
to inflict great damage on America’s energy infrastructure by attacking
a single vulnerable part of the oil distribution or electricity
distribution network. So, taking a page from the early pioneers of
ARPANET, we should develop a distributed electricity and liquid fuels
distribution network that is less dependent on large coal-fired
generating plants and vulnerable oil ports and refineries.

Small windmills and photovoltaic solar cells distributed widely
throughout the electricity grid would sharply reduce CO2 emissions and
at the same time increase our energy security. Likewise, widely
dispersed ethanol and biodiesel production facilities would shift our
transportation fuel stocks to renewable forms of energy while making us
less dependent on and vulnerable to disruptions in the supply of
expensive crude oil from the Persian Gulf, Venezuela and Nigeria, all
of which are extremely unreliable sources upon which to base our future
economic vitality. It would also make us less vulnerable to the impact
of a category 5 hurricane hitting coastal refineries or to a terrorist
attack on ports or key parts of our current energy infrastructure.

Just as a robust information economy was triggered by the
introduction of the Internet, a dynamic new renewable energy economy
can be stimulated by the development of an “electranet,” or smart grid,
that allows individual homeowners and business-owners anywhere in
America to use their own renewable sources of energy to sell
electricity into the grid when they have a surplus and purchase it from
the grid when they don’t. The same electranet could give homeowners and
business-owners accurate and powerful tools with which to precisely
measure how much energy they are using where and when, and identify
opportunities for eliminating unnecessary costs and wasteful usage
patterns.

A second group of building blocks to solve the climate crisis
involves America’s transportation infrastructure. We could further
increase the value and efficiency of a distributed energy network by
retooling our failing auto giants — GM and Ford — to require and assist
them in switching to the manufacture of flex-fuel, plug-in, hybrid
vehicles. The owners of such vehicles would have the ability to use
electricity as a principle source of power and to supplement it by
switching from gasoline to ethanol or biodiesel. This flexibility would
give them incredible power in the marketplace for energy to push the
entire system to much higher levels of efficiency and in the process
sharply reduce global warming pollution.

This shift would also offer the hope of saving tens of thousands
of good jobs in American companies that are presently fighting a losing
battle selling cars and trucks that are less efficient than the ones
made by their competitors in countries where they were forced to reduce
their pollution and thus become more efficient.

It is, in other words, time for a national oil change. That is apparent to anyone who has looked at our national dipstick.

Our current ridiculous dependence on oil endangers not only our
national security, but also our economic security. Anyone who believes
that the international market for oil is a “free market” is seriously
deluded. It has many characteristics of a free market, but it is also
subject to periodic manipulation by the small group of nations
controlling the largest recoverable reserves, sometimes in concert with
companies that have great influence over the global production,
refining, and distribution network.

It is extremely important for us to be clear among ourselves
that these periodic efforts to manipulate price and supply have not one
but two objectives. They naturally seek to maximize profits. But even
more significantly, they seek to manipulate our political will. Every
time we come close to recognizing the wisdom of developing our own
independent sources of renewable fuels, they seek to dissipate our
sense of urgency and derail our effort to become less dependent. That
is what is happening at this very moment.

Shifting to a greater reliance on ethanol, cellulosic ethanol,
butanol, and green diesel fuels will not only reduce global warming
pollution and enhance our national and economic security, it will also
reverse the steady loss of jobs and income in rural America. Several
important building blocks for America’s role in solving the climate
crisis can be found in new approaches to agriculture. As pointed out by
the “25 by 25″ movement (aimed at securing 25% of America’s power and
transportation fuels from agricultural sources by the year 2025) we can
revitalize the farm economy by shifting its mission from a focus on
food, feed and fiber to a focus on food, feed, fiber, fuel, and
ecosystem services. We can restore the health of depleted soils by
encouraging and rewarding the growing of fuel source crops like
switchgrass and saw-grass, using no till cultivation, and scientific
crop rotation. We should also reward farmers for planting more trees
and sequestering more carbon, and recognize the economic value of their
stewardship of resources that are important to the health of our
ecosystems.

Similarly, we should take bold steps to stop deforestation and
extend the harvest cycle on timber to optimize the carbon sequestration
that is most powerful and most efficient with older trees. On a
worldwide basis, 2 and ½ trillion tons of the 10 trillion tons of CO2
emitted each year come from burning forests. So, better management of
forests is one of the single most important strategies for solving the
climate crisis.

Biomass–whether in the form of trees, switchgrass, or other
sources–is one of the most important forms of renewable energy. And
renewable sources make up one of the most promising building blocks for
reducing carbon pollution.

Wind energy is already fully competitive as a mainstream source
of electricity and will continue to grow in prominence and
profitability.

Solar photovoltaic energy is–according to researchers–much
closer than it has ever been to a cost competitive breakthrough, as new
nanotechnologies are being applied to dramatically enhance the
efficiency with which solar cells produce electricity from sunlight–and
as clever new designs for concentrating solar energy are used with new
approaches such as Stirling engines that can bring costs sharply down.

Buildings–both commercial and residential–represent a larger
source of global warming pollution than cars and trucks. But new
architecture and design techniques are creating dramatic new
opportunities for huge savings in energy use and global warming
pollution. As an example of their potential, the American Institute of
Architecture and the National Conference of Mayors have endorsed the
“2030 Challenge,” asking the global architecture and building community
to immediately transform building design to require that all new
buildings and developments be designed to use one half the fossil fuel
energy they would typically consume for each building type, and that
all new buildings be carbon neutral by 2030, using zero fossil fuels to
operate. A newly constructed building at Oberlin College is producing
30 percent energy than it consumes. Some other countries have actually
required a standard calling for zero carbon based energy inputs for new
buildings.

The rapid urbanization of the world’s population is leading to
the prospective development of more new urban buildings in the next 35
years than have been constructed in all previous human history. This
startling trend represents a tremendous opportunity for sharp
reductions in global warming pollution through the use of intelligent
architecture and design and stringent standards.

Here in the US the extra cost of efficiency improvements such as
thicker insulation and more efficient window coatings have
traditionally been shunned by builders and homebuyers alike because
they add to the initial purchase price–even though these investments
typically pay for themselves by reducing heating and cooling costs and
then produce additional savings each month for the lifetime of the
building. It should be possible to remove the purchase price barrier
for such improvements through the use of innovative mortgage finance
instruments that eliminate any additional increase in the purchase
price by capturing the future income from the expected savings. We
should create a Carbon Neutral Mortgage Association to market these new
financial instruments and stimulate their use in the private sector by
utilities, banks and homebuilders. This new “Connie Mae” (CNMA) could
be a valuable instrument for reducing the pollution from new buildings.

Many believe that a responsible approach to sharply reducing
global warming pollution would involve a significant increase in the
use of nuclear power plants as a substitute for coal-fired generators.
While I am not opposed to nuclear power and expect to see some modest
increased use of nuclear reactors, I doubt that they will play a
significant role in most countries as a new source of electricity. The
main reason for my skepticism about nuclear power playing a much larger
role in the world’s energy future is not the problem of waste disposal
or the danger of reactor operator error, or the vulnerability to
terrorist attack. Let’s assume for the moment that all three of these
problems can be solved. That still leaves two serious issues that are
more difficult constraints. The first is economics; the current
generation of reactors is expensive, take a long time to build, and
only come in one size — extra large. In a time of great uncertainty
over energy prices, utilities must count on great uncertainty in
electricity demand — and that uncertainty causes them to strongly
prefer smaller incremental additions to their generating capacity that
are each less expensive and quicker to build than are large 1000
megawatt light water reactors. Newer, more scalable and affordable
reactor designs may eventually become available, but not soon.
Secondly, if the world as a whole chose nuclear power as the option of
choice to replace coal-fired generating plants, we would face a
dramatic increase in the likelihood of nuclear weapons proliferation.
During my 8 years in the White House, every nuclear weapons
proliferation issue we dealt with was connected to a nuclear reactor
program. Today, the dangerous weapons programs in both Iran and North
Korea are linked to their civilian reactor programs. Moreover,
proposals to separate the ownership of reactors from the ownership of
the fuel supply process have met with stiff resistance from developing
countries who want reactors. As a result of all these problems, I
believe that nuclear reactors will only play a limited role.

The most important set of problems by that must be solved in
charting solutions for the climate crisis have to do with coal, one of
the dirtiest sources of energy that produces far more CO2 for each unit
of energy output than oil or gas. Yet, coal is found in abundance in
the United States, China, and many other places . Because the pollution
from the burning of coal is currently excluded from the market
calculations of what it costs, coal is presently the cheapest source of
abundant energy. And its relative role is growing rapidly day by day.

Fortunately, there may be a way to capture the CO2 produced as
coal as burned and sequester it safely to prevent it from adding to the
climate crisis. It is not easy. This technique, known as carbon capture
and sequestration (CCS) is expensive and most users of coal have
resisted the investments necessary to use it. However, when the cost of
not using it is calculated, it becomes obvious that CCS will play a
significant and growing role as one of the major building blocks of a
solution to the climate crisis.

Interestingly, the most advanced and environmentally responsible
project for capturing and sequestering CO2 is in one of the most
forbidding locations for energy production anywhere in the world — in
the Norwegian portions of the North Sea. Norway, as it turns out, has
hefty CO2 taxes; and, even though there are many exceptions and
exemptions, oil production is not one of them. As a result, the oil
producers have found it quite economical and profitable to develop and
use advanced CCS technologies in order to avoid the tax they would
otherwise pay for the CO2 they would otherwise emit. The use of similar
techniques could be required for coal-fired generating plants, and can
be used in combination with advanced approaches like integrated
gasification combined cycle (IGCC). Even with the most advanced
techniques, however, the economics of carbon capture and sequestration
will depend upon the availability of and proximity to safe deep storage
reservoirs. Nevertheless, it is time to recognize that the phrase
“clean coal technology” is devoid of meaning unless it means “zero
carbon emissions” technology.

CCS is only one of many new technological approaches that
require a significant increase by governments and business in advanced
research and development to speed the availability of more effective
technologies that can help us solve the climate crisis more quickly.
But it is important to emphasize that even without brand new
technologies, we already have everything we need to get started on a
solution to this crisis.

In a market economy like ours, however, every one of the
solutions that I have discussed will be more effective and much easier
to implement if we place a price on the CO2 pollution that is
recognized in the marketplace. We need to summon the courage to use the
right tools for this job.

For the last fourteen years, I have advocated the elimination of
all payroll taxes — including those for social security and
unemployment compensation — and the replacement of that revenue in the
form of pollution taxes — principally on CO2. The overall level of
taxation would remain exactly the same. It would be, in other words, a
revenue neutral tax swap. But, instead of discouraging businesses from
hiring more employees, it would discourage business from producing more
pollution.

Global warming pollution, indeed all pollution, is now described
by economists as an “externality.” This absurd label means, in essence:
we don’t to keep track of this stuff so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist.

And sure enough, when it’s not recognized in the marketplace, it
does make it much easier for government, business, and all the rest of
us to pretend that it doesn’t exist. But what we’re pretending doesn’t
exist is the stuff that is destroying the habitability of the planet.
We put 70 million tons of it into the atmosphere every 24 hours and the
amount is increasing day by day. Penalizing pollution instead of
penalizing employment will work to reduce that pollution.

When we place a more accurate value on the consequences of the
choices we make, our choices get better. At present, when business has
to pay more taxes in order to hire more people, it is discouraged from
hiring more people. If we change that and discourage them from creating
more pollution they will reduce their pollution. Our market economy can
help us solve this problem if we send it the right signals and tell
ourselves the truth about the economic impact of pollution.

Many of our leading businesses are already making dramatic
changes to reduce their global warming pollution. General Electric,
Dupont, Cinergy, Caterpillar, and Wal-Mart are among the many who are
providing leadership for the business community in helping us devise a
solution for this crisis.

Leaders among unions — particularly the steel workers — have also added momentum to this growing movement.

Hunters and fishermen are also now adding their voices to the
call for a solution to the crisis. In a recent poll, 86% of licensed
hunters and anglers said that we have a moral obligation to stop global
warming to protect our children’s future.

And, young people — as they did during the Civil Rights
Revolution — are confronting their elders with insistent questions
about the morality of not moving swiftly to make these needed changes.

Moreover, the American religious community — including a group
of 85 conservative evangelicals and especially the US Conference of
Catholic Bishops — has made an extraordinary contribution to this
entire enterprise. To the insights of science and technology, it has
added the perspectives of faith and values, of prophetic imagination,
spiritual motivation, and moral passion without which all our plans, no
matter how reasonable, simply will not prevail. Individual faith groups
have offered their own distinctive views . And yet — uniquely in
religious life at this moment and even historically — they have
established common ground and resolve across tenacious differences. In
addition to reaching millions of people in the pews, they have
demonstrated the real possibility of what we all now need to
accomplish: how to be ourselves, together and how to discover, in this
process, a sense of vivid, living spirit and purpose that elevates the
entire human enterprise.

Individual Americans of all ages are becoming a part of a
movement, asking what they can do as individuals and what they can do
as consumers and as citizens and voters. Many individuals and
businesses have decided to take an approach known as “Zero Carbon.”
They are reducing their CO2 as much as possible and then offsetting the
rest with reductions elsewhere including by the planting of trees. At
least one entire community — Ballard, a city of 18,000 people in
Washington State — is embarking on a goal of making the entire
community zero carbon.

This is not a political issue. This is a moral issue. It affects
the survival of human civilization. It is not a question of left vs.
right; it is a question of right vs. wrong. Put simply, it is wrong to
destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every
generation that follows ours.
What is motivating millions of Americans to think differently about
solutions to the climate crisis is the growing realization that this
challenge is bringing us unprecedented opportunity. I have spoken
before about the way the Chinese express the concept of crisis. They
use two symbols, the first of which — by itself — means danger. The
second, in isolation, means opportunity. Put them together, and you get
“crisis.” Our single word conveys the danger but doesn’t always
communicate the presence of opportunity in every crisis. In this case,
the opportunity presented by the climate crisis is not only the
opportunity for new and better jobs, new technologies, new
opportunities for profit, and a higher quality of life. It gives us an
opportunity to experience something that few generations ever have the
privilege of knowing: a common moral purpose compelling enough to lift
us above our limitations and motivate us to set aside some of the
bickering to which we as human beings are naturally vulnerable.
America’s so-called “greatest generation” found such a purpose when
they confronted the crisis of global fascism and won a war in Europe
and in the Pacific simultaneously. In the process of achieving their
historic victory, they found that they had gained new moral authority
and a new capacity for vision. They created the Marshall Plan and
lifted their recently defeated adversaries from their knees and
assisted them to a future of dignity and self-determination. They
created the United Nations and the other global institutions that made
possible many decades of prosperity, progress and relative peace. In
recent years we have squandered that moral authority and it is high
time to renew it by taking on the highest challenge of our generation.
In rising to meet this challenge, we too will find self-renewal and
transcendence and a new capacity for vision to see other crises in our
time that cry out for solutions: 20 million HIV/AIDs orphans in Africa
alone, civil wars fought by children, genocides and famines, the rape
and pillage of our oceans and forests, an extinction crisis that
threatens the web of life, and tens of millions of our fellow humans
dying every year from easily preventable diseases. And, by rising to
meet the climate crisis, we will find the vision and moral authority to
see them not as political problems but as moral imperatives.

This is an opportunity for bipartisanship and transcendence, an
opportunity to find our better selves and in rising to meet this
challenge, create a better brighter future — a future worthy of the
generations who come after us and who have a right to be able to depend
on us.